By Fiona Czerniawska 26%. That’s the proportion of clients in the energy and resources sector globally who think that strategy firms deliver poor-quality work, twice the level of clients on average, and three or four times as many who say this about Big Four or technology firms. Indeed, attitudes about technology firms move in the opposite direction, being more positive in this sector than on average. 
So what’s the problem? It could be the data, but, for our new report on perceptions among clients in this sector, we asked just over 30 senior executives in the sector to give us feedback about three firms (so 100+ data points in total) and several hundred people across all sectors, so why would this part of our survey population be any different from the rest? The first point to make is that this isn’t a marketing problem, though the 63% of ‘indirect’ clients in the sector (i.e. people who know a firm by reputation but haven’t directly worked with it or bought its services within the last two years) who think that the quality of work is likely to be average suggests that there could be some room for improvement here. The issue is with ‘direct’ clients (those who’ve actively bought the firm’s services or worked with it in the last two years) – and it’s not simply a case of this group having more negative views. In fact, their opinions are highly polarised: while a third of them have negative views about the quality of strategy firms’ work, almost 60% take the positive view. So now we have a different question: what’s driving such a black-and-white attitude? To answer that, we need to drill down to a further level of detail and look at clients’ views on the quality of work done by strategy firms in different areas. Predictably, these are most positive in the strategy space, where two thirds of direct clients are positive, and many of the rest are neutral. In what will be good news for strategy firms, opinions are similarly positive about the firms’ work in new (digital) technology. But it’s a different story where existing technology is concerned, where a whopping 40% of clients have negative views. That’s not surprising: strategy firms have never aspired to be leaders in the ERP space, for example. But it does have implications for something strategy firms will care about: transformation work. At a time when the words ‘digital’ and ‘transformation’ seem inextricably linked, it’s worth remembering that both depend on clients’ ability to leverage or change their underlying (‘old-fashioned’) systems. That 37% of ‘direct’ clients in the energy and resources sector who think that strategy firms do poor or very poor quality transformation work is a salutary reminder of that fact, and should give strategy firms pause for thought when trumpeting the depth of their digital experience.
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